Sometimes the best bailout is no bailout
Primary tabs
Submitted by lambert on Tue, 09/23/2008 - 9:09am
"I think it's awful," said Allen Meltzer, a former Reagan economic adviser now teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. "It puts private interests ahead of the public interest." Mr. Meltzer pointed to past occasions when, he said, doomsayers warned of financial panic, the government resisted the urge to bail out the markets, and nothing terrible ensued. Among those he cited was President Richard Nixon's decision not to rescue the commercial-paper market in the aftermath of the collapse of the Penn Central railroad.
Just saying. Wiser heads than mine can explain why the situations are not the same, but the timing of this one really makes me wonder....
- lambert's blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Comments
stressing again: this is a Constitutional, and not financial
crisis. the simple version is that right now, it's very clear that 'we the people' are not being represented by our elected officials, who are in fact little more than millionaire-whores to billionaire overlords. they are selling of an entire generation's future so that a handful of already wealthy people can be more wealthy. no matter what your political stripe, you must oppose this in strongest terms. for no matter who is 'elected' president, no matter which party holds the majority, they will be rendered powerless once this transfer of wealth is approved. there isn't enough money in the world to cover the extent of the shitpile, and at the same time the world won't end if the market is corrected and real values return to investment portfolios. we can have a short term crisis by letting that happen, or we can enslave future generations to service these people's greed.
Absolutely, CD
This is a political crisis.
What's been lost over the last eight years, particularly since 2006, is that while it's true that the Congress can't do much without the President, it's also true that the President can't do much without the Congress. The Congress has either forgotten that and/or is perfectly happy to go along with the President. They are some combination of corrupt, foolish, inept, and cowardly. Pick your mix, but the results are the same. A badly broken government that will only lead to more crises if it's not fixed.
And there's no better time than the present and trying to rally people to force the Congress to do its Constitutional duty.
Newt Gingrich made a similar point yesterday
on NPR (All Things Considered), and I don't say that to cast aspersions on this post or the comments above. I'm just saying that it's a weird, weird world when CD, BDBlue, and Newtie agree on anything.
It's Fucking Disconcerting
to agree with idiots. And on top of everything else awful about Newt Gingrich, he's stupid (I know from people who have met him).
But somewhere deep in his lizard brain he has some sort of primal understanding of politics, like a lot of Republicans do. And they know how angry people are and it's not just cd and me. So they're going to use it. They've been looking for a way to break with Bush and now they have it.
This is going to be the "Bush-Pelosi" bailout plan - the Village against average Americans. Which is fucking stupid because the Democrats - and their leader Obama - have been handed an opportunity to define themselves in opposition to the Bush bailout. It's just that so far, they've never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.